J Street is not being honest about Israel.
It's perfectly acceptable to have different opinions, but it's a whole other thing to distort, mislead, and accuse Israel of complete falsehoods.
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For those of you who don’t know J Street, it is a self-described “pro-Israel, pro-peace” advocacy organization that seeks to influence American policy toward Israel and the Israeli-Arab conflict. It presents itself as a “liberal Zionist” alternative to more traditional pro-Israel organizations.
Yet there is something deeply rotten about J Street’s vision of Israel — but not because it supports a two-state solution (like many Israelis did pre-October 7th), and not because it criticizes the Israeli government (like virtually every Israeli does).
J Street’s problem is something much more fundamental: It increasingly speaks about Israel as though the greatest threats to liberalism, democracy, human rights, coexistence, and peace originate primarily from the Jewish state, rather than from the political culture that has spent more than a century rejecting said Jewish state’s existence.
At some point, we need to have an honest conversation about what that means.
In a recent essay, J Street founder and president Jeremy Ben-Ami posed a question that he says is increasingly common among younger progressives: “How can someone claim to believe in equality, human rights and liberal values while supporting a state that defines itself as the nation-state of the Jewish people?”1
But perhaps the more relevant question is the opposite one: How can someone claim to believe in equality, human rights, liberal values, pluralism, democracy, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, religious freedom, minority rights, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the rule of law while supporting the Palestinian national movement?
That is not a rhetorical question. Israel is and has always been the only democratic country in the Middle East which is, by definition, liberal. Israeli citizens vote in free elections, our courts operate independently, our press is free and often fiercely critical of the government, and our minorities enjoy political and legal rights that remain rare throughout much of the region.
Whatever criticisms one may have of particular Israeli governments or policies, the idea that Israel is somehow fundamentally at odds with liberal values ignores the reality of how the country has functioned since its founding in 1948.
Meanwhile, Palestinian society consistently produces polling showing overwhelming support for terrorism, rejection of Jewish sovereignty, and opposition to normalization with Israel. The Palestinian Authority criminalizes the sale of land to Jews and continues its pay-to-slay-Jews policy. Hamas openly advocates the destruction of Israel. Neither has built anything resembling a liberal democracy.
Yet somehow “progressive” discourse often treats support for Palestinian nationalism as morally self-evident while support for Jewish nationalism requires endless justification. That inversion alone should raise questions.
Ben-Ami writes that younger Jews are increasingly “drifting away from traditional support for Israel and toward visions such as a single binational state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” Since when are any Jews outside of Israel entitled to determine Israel’s borders? Is it not whiny, condescending, and arrogant for people who do not live and have never lived in Israel to tell Israelis what their borders should and shouldn’t be?
If Ben-Ami cares so much about younger generations of Jews, he should speak honestly about Israel, not brainwash them into thinking that the Jewish state is some cancer while nobody proposes dissolving Jordan’s Arab identity, nobody proposes dismantling Egypt’s national character, and nobody suggests that France, Greece, Poland, Armenia, Japan, or Ireland surrender their national identities in favor of multinational political experiments.
In Ben-Ami’s mind, it is honorable for only the Jewish state to routinely be told that preserving its national character is morally suspect.
Never mind that the Palestinians have transformed an antisemitic conflict into a century-long struggle that has repeatedly rejected partition, compromise, coexistence, and peace agreements. The Arab world has launched multiple wars aimed at preventing or destroying Jewish sovereignty. Palestinian leaders rejected statehood opportunities in 1937, 1947, 2000, 2001, and 2008. Yet somehow the burden of redesigning national identity falls primarily on Israel.
We are apparently not allowed to tell Palestinians that a century of rejectionism has failed. We are apparently not allowed to suggest that they abandon maximalist demands that have perpetuated conflict for generations. But many like Ben-Ami and his ilk feel perfectly comfortable telling Israelis how they should live their lives from the friendly confines of America.
No, no, no, though, let’s not go too deep into the Israel ditch, Ben-Ami assures us. Just when we think his essay titled “Why Is J Street Pro-Israel?” is about Israel, he wants us to believe that the debate is really “about whether liberalism and nationalism are fundamentally incompatible.” Spoiler: The Jewish state has already answered that question — for nearly eight decades.
Israel is one of the world’s clearest demonstrations that national self-determination and liberal democracy can coexist. We have competitive elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, political opposition, civil society, religious pluralism, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, minority representation, and robust political dissent. The notion that Jewish nationalism is somehow uniquely incompatible with liberal values requires ignoring the actual history of the Jewish state.
What is especially striking is how frequently critics attribute to Israel characteristics that are far more applicable to its adversaries. Ben-Ami warns against nationalism rooted in fear, superiority, exclusion, domination, and suspicion of outsiders — all defining features of political culture throughout much of the Arab and Muslim world for generations.
Jews were treated as second-class citizens across much of the Middle East for centuries, then expelled with nothing to leave with when the State of Israel was founded. Nearly every ancient Jewish community in the Arab world disappeared during the 20th century. Minority rights remain fragile or nonexistent throughout much of the region. Religious minorities have been persecuted, expelled, or exterminated. Political dissent is often suppressed. Democracy remains nonexistent — except, well, for Israel.
And yet Israelis are frequently portrayed as the primary embodiment of exclusionary nationalism while the societies surrounding it are treated as victims of nationalism rather than practitioners of it. This is not analysis. It is gaslighting.
The same pattern appears when Ben-Ami criticizes Israel’s current government for pursuing “permanent conflict.” But permanent conflict was not invented by Israelis. Permanent conflict has been the organizing principle of anti-Zionist politics since long before Israel existed.
The conflict did not begin because Jews retook Judea and Samaria, the heartland of ancient Israel, in 1967 after it was occupied by Jordan. It did not begin because of “settlements.” It did not begin because of Netanyahu. It began because overwhelming segments of the Arab world rejected the idea that Jews could exercise sovereignty anywhere in the Middle East. That rejection existed before a single settlement was built, before a single checkpoint existed, before Israel controlled the Golan Heights, Judea, or Samaria.
To discuss the conflict while minimizing that reality is to invert cause and effect.
Perhaps the most revealing line in Ben-Ami’s essay is when he writes: “We believe the national home of the Jewish people must be democratic.” But Israel is already democratic. Netanyahu was elected in a free and fair election in 2022, and before that he was in the opposition because he lost the prior election. Just yesterday, Israeli lawmakers voted in favor of a coalition bill to dissolve the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), potentially triggering early elections in a few months.
So Ben-Ami is telling us the obvious, but making it seem as though Israelis are a bunch of kindergartners just starting to learn right from wrong. Anyone who knows anything about Israel knows that the Jewish state always has been democratic. It is not aspiring to become democratic. It is democratic.
So what exactly is being implied here?
Ben-Ami’s statement only makes sense if one believes Israel is the Islamic Republic of Iran. It only makes sense if lying to people about Israel drives more fundraising dollars and attracts more publicity in order to drive even more fundraising dollars. It only makes sense if the objective is not to understand reality as it is, but to construct a version of reality that effectively results in more antisemitism across the world.
By any serious global standard, Israel remains a democracy despite operating under security pressures that few democracies have ever faced. Why is Ben-Ami suggesting otherwise?
I get the sense that he and J Street are not arguing with Israel as it exists. They are arguing with an imagined Israel that exists primarily in “progressive” political discourse — the kind of discourse that says, “If I don’t like your politics, you must be wrong, illegitimate, and unworthy of respect.” The Israel in J Street’s hallucinations is an Israel uniquely responsible for conflict, uniquely vulnerable to the evils of nationalism, uniquely obligated to justify its existence, uniquely judged by standards not applied to any other nation.
This is ultimately the central problem with J Street’s worldview.
The organization claims to “defend Israel” while increasingly adopting the assumptions of those who place Jews at the center of every moral indictment. The organization claims to champion universal values while applying those values selectively. The organization claims to oppose false choices while repeatedly presenting Israel as the primary obstacle to ideals that much of the region has never meaningfully embraced.
If J Street is serious about liberalism, democracy, human rights, coexistence, and peace, then we should begin with an honest assessment of reality. And reality tells us something simple: The greatest threat to liberal democracy in the Middle East has never been the existence of a Jewish state. The greatest threat has been the refusal of much of the region, including and especially the Palestinians, to accept that Jewish state’s existence in the first place.
Until organizations like J Street are willing to confront that fact with the same intensity they bring to criticizing Israel, their analysis will continue to distort, manipulate, and mislead.
Unsurprisingly, Jeremy Ben-Ami invoked “Jewish identity and values” in his essay, because nothing says gaslighting like using the language of Jewish morality to explain why Jews should bear responsibility for problems that their neighbors have spent more than a century creating, perpetuating, and refusing to solve.
This has become one of the defining features of modern “progressive” discourse. Every conversation eventually returns to what Israel must do, what Israel must concede, what Israel must be and not be, what Israel must apologize for, and what Israel must sacrifice. Far less attention is devoted to what the Palestinians and Arabs must do, what they must abandon, what they must accept, and what responsibilities they bear for the reality they predominantly paved themselves.
Jewish values are invoked to explain why Israel should take greater risks for peace. Rarely are universal values invoked to explain why Palestinian leaders should stop glorifying terrorism, stop teaching generations of children that Jewish sovereignty in the Jews’ indigenous homeland is a forever injustice, and stop treating compromise as betrayal.
Jewish morality is used to demand self-reflection from Israelis. Arab and Palestinian political culture is too often excused from the same scrutiny altogether.
The result is a conversation that sounds morally sophisticated but is actually intellectually hollow. It asks the side that has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to compromise, withdraw, negotiate, and coexist to engage in endless introspection, while asking comparatively little of the side that has spent much of the last century rejecting every arrangement that would have allowed both peoples to live side by side.
That is not a serious framework for peace, but it is a framework for projecting self-hatred.
The irony is that the Jewish values Ben-Ami invokes are real. Judaism does teach self-criticism. It does demand moral accountability. It does insist that power be exercised responsibly.
But those values do not require Jews to ignore reality. They do not require Israelis to pretend that the conflict began with settlements, Netanyahu, or a supposed “occupation.” They do not require the Jewish state to assume responsibility for every failure, every rejection, and every act of violence committed by those dedicated to opposing its existence.
A genuinely honest conversation about Israel would begin with a simple observation: The conflict has persisted not because Jews built a state, but because too many people (Jeremy Ben-Ami and his organization notwithstanding) want to slander the Jewish state at every possible opportunity until it no longer exists anymore.
“Why Is J Street Pro-Israel?” Word on the Street.
There is nothing J about J Street.
J-Street appears clueless regarding the sole aim of Palestinianism which has nothing to do about land! They have absolutely shut their eyes about every effort and every peace offer made by Israel, and the fact they all ended in Jewish bloodshed! The only function they serve is a twisted view of reality used by the activist media to get a misrepresented Jewish point of view. They have rendered themselves irrelevant and dillusional even after the 2nd intafada! Their behavior post October 7 is hideous beyond description!